Ticketmaster has as soon as once more cracked below the burden of a Taylor Swift ticket sale — this time in France.

As French followers ready on Tuesday to buy tickets to 6 concert events in Could and June 2024 on Swift’s Eras Tour — 4 exhibits in Paris, two in Lyon — Ticketmaster’s web site displayed a huge queue of shoppers prepared to purchase; one screenshot appeared to inform a fan that 1,023,504 consumers had been in line forward of them.

Quickly, Ticketmaster introduced that gross sales for these exhibits had been positioned on “pause.” The corporate mentioned {that a} new on-sale time could be introduced, and that “all codes not already used will stay legitimate.” However some followers’ social media posts appeared to point out technical errors on Ticketmaster’s web site, together with a progress icon that “retains spinning and spinning and spinning,” as one fan — talking English with an American accent, however with 762 euros’ value of tickets of their buying cart — put it.

A couple of hours later, the French department of Ticketmaster supplied some extra element on social media, blaming the issue on a “third-party supplier” that the corporate didn’t establish, and including that tickets had been nonetheless accessible. A consultant of Stay Nation Leisure, Ticketmaster’s company father or mother, mentioned that the supplier works with Ticketmaster solely in France.

The state of affairs in France gave the impression to be a irritating repeat of the issues that plagued Swift’s North American presale in November, when an inflow of hundreds of thousands of followers — and bots — overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s methods, and followers reported points like tickets of their buying carts disappearing earlier than they may very well be bought. Ticketmaster shut down its public sale because of this, although the corporate additionally mentioned it had bought greater than two million tickets to the tour in a single day.

Issues like these at Swift’s presale in November — in addition to long-simmering issues over Ticketmaster and Stay Nation’s market dominance — led to a brutal Senate Judiciary listening to in January. Senators from each events flatly known as the corporate a monopoly and had been skeptical of an govt’s clarification that Ticketmaster was unable to defend itself in opposition to an onslaught of bots throughout Swift’s presale.

“That is unbelievable,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, mentioned on the listening to. “Why is it,” she added, “that you haven’t developed an algorithm to kind out what’s a bot and what’s a client?”

But the demand for Swift tickets has been extraordinary, with Swift promoting out stadiums all over the place she performs and tickets going for 1000’s of {dollars} on the secondary market. She is scheduled to finish the North American leg of her tour subsequent month, then play in Latin America, Asia and Europe.

The Justice Division has individually been conducting an antitrust investigation of Stay Nation. The Justice Division has not confirmed that investigation, however Stay Nation’s chief govt, Michael Rapino, has spoken about it brazenly.